Earlier today at a ribbon-cutting ceremony featuring White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Director John Holdren and Chief of Naval Research Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) opened the Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research (LASR) on its campus in Washington, DC. LASR aims “to support cutting-edge research in robotics and autonomous systems of interest to the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Department of Defense, [including] unmanned underwater vehicles, autonomous firefighting robots, and sensor networks.” According to a post on the OSTP Blog announcing the opening: LASR will … advance the goals of the President’s National Robotics Initiative, a multi-agency effort to strengthen U.S. leadership in robotics and to […]

On Feb. 16th, over 150 Federal officials, Congressional staffers, academic researchers, and industry leaders packed a room overlooking the United States Capitol to mark two decades of coordinated Federal investment in networking and information technology research and development with a daylong symposium exploring progress and prospects in the field. Today, I’m delighted to announce that we are launching a new website with complete materials from this extraordinary day — including videos, photos, slides, and written summaries from the 19 15-minute presentations by leaders of the field, plus a luncheon keynote by former Vice President Al Gore, a longtime champion of information technology R&D, and special remarks by former Congressman Tom […]

Just in time for the kickoff of March Madness later today, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer science professor Sheldon Jacobson describes the mathematics behind bracketology — and BracketOdds, a website his research team developed that uses data from 27 past tournaments “to identify a distribution that models the probability of certain seed combinations playing each round of the tournament.” From the interview, posted on UIUC’s website: The tournament is exciting for its upsets and seeming unpredictability. Yet your research has found distinct patterns. How can that help people trying to make sense of it all?   Each game in the tournament can be viewed as a random experiment, with a different […]

Vijay Kumar, Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Applied Mechanics as well as Computer & Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered a fascinating talk at last month’s 2012 TED Conference in Long Beach, CA, summarizing recent advances in his General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab. Kumar described how his lab is blending computer science and mechanical engineering to create flying quadrotor robots, which “move together in eerie formation, tightening themselves into perfect battalions, even filling in the gap when one of their own drops out.” According to Kumar: [Agile aerial] robots like this have many applications. You can send them inside buildings as first responders to look for intruders, […]

Last week, we blogged about Larry Smarr’s efforts to quantify his own health. Turns out Larry is speaking out today, in his own words, as part of a front-page profile on the front page of The San Diego Tribune: “Quantified health, to me, means tracking data about your body — as simple as weighing yourself on a scale once a day to as complicated as wearing a device at night to measure every 30 seconds your sleep state…   “The reason you do this — you modify your behavior. And it’s the same thing as you drive your car. You look at the speedometer, and if it’s a 60-mile-per-hour zone, you try to […]

On the heels of Saturday’s New York Times‘ story about iRobot, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is out with a feature today describing how a pair of computing researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are programming “robot teachers” that can gaze and gesture like humans. According to the NSF piece: When it comes to communication, sometimes it’s our body language that says the most — especially when it comes to our eyes.   “It turns out that gaze tells us all sorts of things about attention, about mental states, about roles in conversations,” says Bilge Mutlu, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.   Mutlu … a human-computer interaction specialist … and his […]